Vera Rubin was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Washington, D.C. She earned her B.A. at Vassar College and her M.A. at Cornell University, where she made one of the first studies of deviations from the Hubble flow in the motions of galaxies. This work turned out to be the precursor of studies of the local supercluster. After earning her Ph.D. at Georgetown University under George Gamow, she taught at Montgomery County Junior College and at Georgetown. From 1965 until her retirement she was at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. There she joined with W. Kent Ford, Jr., inventor of an image tube spectrograph, to measure rotation curves of spiral galaxies (and later, ellipticals as well). This work, which she extended considerably as CCDs replaced image tubes, led to the realization that most of the mass in galaxies is dark and that it resides in the outer parts, or haloes. (Dark matter had been suggested as early as 1933 by Fritz Zwicky as necessary to keep clusters of galaxies from flying apart. ) She was a leader in the study of the structure of galaxies, their internal motions, and large-scale motions in the Universe. Stating that she was inspired by the example of Maria Mitchell, Rubin herself was an inspiration and mentor to many younger astronomers. She was at least as proud of her four children, all of whom earned Ph.D.’s in math or science, as of her scientific achievements.